Use of Autobiographies

Hello,

Does anyone know of works written on how to use

autobiographies in historical research? More

precisely, those of Vietnamese writer(or of other

Asian nationalities). There is significant literature

on the use of autobios of North American and European

writers but I have had difficulty locating

methodological/theoretical works on autobios coming

from other parts of the world.

Thanks for your time!

Christine Pothier

PhD student, Department of History

University of Ottawa

One useful book could be:

C.W. Watson: _Of Self and Nation, Autobiography and the Representation of Modern Indonesia_. University of Hawaii Press 2000.

Harry

Dr Harry Aveling, PhD DCA

Dept of Asian Studies

La Trobe University

Victoria 3086, Australia.

Tel: 61-3-9479-1213

Fax: 61-3-9479-1880

Adjunct Professor of Southeast Asian Literature, Ohio University.

I would look in anthropology, or even take an ethnographic field methods

class. We're the people who have been listening to lives outside the

West for a couple hundred years, often editing books and turning them

into other books.

Autobiography in modern VN is the royal road, you can follow the whole

20C, especially among writers. Peter Zinoman just worked up the VCP

prison memoirs. Eric Henry has recently completed his translation of

Pham Duy's rather more expansive story, only one of the fabulous

multimedia works from the early EBAI students.

Dan

This is a bit of a tangent, but now that Dan is naming titles (and I'd

love to hear others!), let me toss in the name of one I just ran

across that I found fascinating: "The Central Highlands: A North

Vietnamese Journal of Life on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, 1965-1973". It

tells the story of a surgeon who was sent south and came to be in

charge of various medical operations, focusing on the day to day:

generating electricity for the operating room by riding a bicycle,

inventinve strategies for surgery where equipment was lacking, food

(and the lack there of), rain, drought, etc.

Diane

A very interesting area of inquiry since there are quite a large corpus of

autobiographies written from all sides during both the First and the Second

Indochina war.

Just coincidentally, I find the advertisement attached below which may be of

some interest.

I have collected no less than 50 autobiographies in the hope of some day to

do something with them.

The omission of some of the most glaring details in those autobiographies is

revealing. It once again highlights the supreme human capacity of self

deception.

Nguyen Ba Chung

====================================================================

From: To: "Leena Messina" <Leena.Messina@anu.edu.au>

Dear all,

Please circulate widely the attached document.

Using lives: a postgraduate workshop in biography

6-10 February 2006

Are you using lives in your research, exploring the biographical dimensions

of your subject, or drawing on the methods and objectives of life history?

Call for applications

The Australian Dictionary of Biography, the History Program, RSSS, and the

Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University are

collaborating in convening a workshop for postgraduate students working in

biography and life history, to be held at the ANU, 6-10 February 2006. In

accordance with the conditions below, and a limited availability of places,

this workshop is open to research students from any discipline and currently

enrolled in an Australian university.

Many thanks,

Leena Messina

Programs Manager

Humanities Research Centre

Old Canberra House (Building 73), Lennox Crossing

The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia

T: Direct international: 61 2 6125 4357; Australia: 02 6125 4357 (phone and

voicemail)

F: Direct international: 61 2 6125 1380; Australia: 02 6125 1380

E: Leena.Messina@anu.edu.au

WWW: http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/

ANU Cricos Provider No. 00120C

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

==========================================================

Using lives:

a postgraduate workshop in biography

6-10 February 2006

Are you using lives in your research, exploring the biographical dimensions

of your subject, or drawing on the methods and objectives of life history?

Call for applications

The Australian Dictionary of Biography, the History Program, RSSS, and the

Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University are

collaborating in convening a workshop for postgraduate students working in

biography and life history, to be held at the ANU, 6-10 February 2006. In

accordance with the conditions below, and a limited availability of places,

this workshop is open to research students from any discipline and currently

enrolled in an Australian university.

Objectives

Biography and 'life writing' are figuring increasingly prominently in

humanities and social science research, both as central approaches and as

methods by which to advance diverse areas of enquiry. As a form, biography

retains its popularity, and adapts creatively to new technologies and

opportunities in presenting research. This workshop will provide a forum in

which postgraduate students working on aspects of biography can discuss,

reflect on and debate aspects of the 'biographical turn' in scholarship,

publication and the media, as it relates to their work, and to their

opportunities for professional development. The workshop will:

-generate discussion and reflection on issues of biographical

enquiry;

-enable students to develop networks to assist in their research

and development;

-explore opportunities for the presentation of

biographically-informed work using diverse resources and media.

Format

The workshop will be led by experts in areas related to these objectives,

and evaluating new directions and opportunities in biographical enquiry in

fields ranging from autobiography, across models including modernity, gender

and transnationalism, to issues of publication and the presentation of

biography in re-enactment, film and digitisation initiatives such as those

of the ADB Online project. Among the speakers will be: Gordon Briscoe,

Lenore Coltheart, Ann Curthoys, Desley Deacon, Ian Donaldson, Rosanne

Kennedy, Marilyn Lake, Di Langmore, Iain McCalman, Michael McMahon, Jill

Matthews, Frances Peters-Little, Jill Roe, Tim Rowse, Margaret Somerville

and the research editors of the ADB. The program will be centred on

sessions in which students present their own research for discussion.

Location

'Using Lives' will be held at the Humanities Research Centre, Old Canberra

House, ANU. Self-catering accommodation for the week will be provided at

Liversidge Court, ANU.

Eligibility

The workshop is open to postgraduate (MA and PhD) students who are currently

enrolled in a degree course in an Australian university, are working on

research projects which are substantially biographical in subject, theme or

method, and whose attendance is endorsed by the head of the department in

which they are enrolled.

Applications should include: thesis title and abstract (250 words max.),

curriculum vitae noting stage of current research; and a letter of

endorsement, signed by the head of department in which the student is

enrolled. Applications will be assessed by a committee (Nicholas Brown,

Desley Deacon, Ian Donaldson, Iain McCalman) according to the suitability of

the research topic to the workshop's themes, and the current stage of

research.

Applications should be emailed to nicholas.brown@anu.edu.au by 11 November

2005.

Cost

The workshop and self-catering accommodation (for students from outside

Canberra) will be funded jointly by the Australian Dictionary of Biography,

History Program, RSSS, the Humanities Research Centre, and supported by the

National Institute of Social Sciences and Law. Students will need to fund

their own travel.

For further information, please contact: Nicholas Brown, Australian

Dictionary of Biography, H.C. Coombs Building, Australian National

University, ACT, 0200; (02) 6125 3052; nicholas.brown@anu.edu.au

Dear Chung--

I don't know what "something" you hope to do with them, but several of

us who teach have lamented the lack of a range of autobiographies and

memoirs in English. So this note just comes in strong support of your

doing "something".

Diane

Dear Diane:

Thank you for your words of encouragement. Currently I concentrate almost

exclusively on the translation of poetry for the simple reason that I enjoy

reading poetry and it usually takes much shorter time to read and to

translate. Prose requires much longer lead time and a much more concentrated

effort if you want to do it right. For poetry, you could do a few poems, get

sidetracked into something else, but could always return to some other

poems, each a germ in itself, and standing independently by itself.

What interests me most in these autobiographies is to try to decipher the

mystery of how the Vietnamese ever allowed themselved to be drawn into such

a mess, knowingly or unknowingly, with some being even proud of it. What

happened to those who foresaw the tragical consequences before they happened? Why their efforts of finding a third path failed utterly ?

It is my humble view that unless the Vietnamese fully understood the debacle

that led to the death of four to five million combatants and civilians,

mostly civilians, the almost total destruction of the country -

environmentally and culturally, whose consequences are very much still with

us, and are the hidden causes of all our current divisions, it could happen

again, as some, no doubt, are very happy that it could start again.

What self-deceptions led to that debacle ? Could these autobiographies help

to throw a shining light on that ?

Nguyen Ba Chung

of note, re: autobiographies/memoirs/life history, VN

"Ao Dai: My War, My Country, My Vietnam" by Xuan Phuong, English ed.

2004, Emquad publ. was recently translated from the French and sent to

our student journal at UH for review (in the next issue). The most

interesting aspect of her account was the blunt descriptions of bleak

life in Hanoi in the 1970s and 80s. I also found a copy of Mark

Sidel's translation of Duong thi Thoa (Le Thi)'s account, in the

journal Signs, 23(4), 1998 which was quite fascinating.

I don't know of any serious attempts to analyze women's memoirs such

as these, but this would be a great research topic and would

definitely fill a void in the English-language corpus of first-hand

accounts.

Margaret Barnhill Bodemer

Christine,

At the risk of sounding immodest, you might find my Journal of Asian Studies article on Tran Duc Thao (Journal of Asian Studies, August? 2002) to be of use. I explore the issue of how to represent an individual's past, and in particular when fragments of "autobiography" appear in sources like self-criticism texts. Tran Duc Thao is a particularly interesting case because there are two (auto)biographies that haven't been stictched together well: the tale of his becoming a philosopher in France (up to 1950 or so), and the tale of his life in Vietnam. It's as if he is two different individuals, known in two completely divorced worlds.

Christoph Giebel, of course, has addressed some key issues in biography and autobiography in his work on Ton Duc Thang.

I'd be interested to hear others comment on the relevance of other writing on autobiography to studying Vietnamese writers. Some of the literature on autobiography out there seems to see autobiography as a narrative of self-fashioning and self-actualization. Is such literature too "self" obsessed? Vietnamese, historically, have not been published diaries or flaunted the self. And when they do flaunt an individual (e.g. biographies of Ho Chi Minh written secretly by Ho himself) they have a clear didactic function.

Shawn McHale

The topic of autobiography, and biography for that matter, relating to Vietnam is a fascinating one, and one that could do with a lot more research. Shawn is right that historically Vietnamese have not written a lot about themselves, though there are places where one can find some fascinating exceptions. The following are just two from the 18th century:

Phan Huy Ich's various collections of poetry include his brief prose prefaces, many of which describe the context in which he wrote the poem: my wife is ill, my legs hurt, my house just burned down, I got summoned by the Tay Son Emperor, but was nervous about going. Frankly, I found some of these comments more interesting than the poems.

Pham Dinh Ho (1768-1839), who was a prolific writer of prose and poetry. His collected essays, esp. Vu Trung Tuy Buy (lit. Following the Brush Amid the Rains) include fascinating personal information, esp. in the introduction where he writes about his addiction to tea (!), and of playing with his father's official's hat as a kid. Some of the anecdotes in the body of the text also describe his teaching career and various outings he made.

I am starting work on a new project to write a biography of Philiphe Binh (1759-1832), a Jesuit priest who travelled from VN to Portugal, where he lived for more than 35 years. He wrote prolifically as well, and a fair bit about himself. He was highly opinionated, as well as an excellent observer of life around him, which is reflected in his writings. His writings represent perhaps the earliest self-consciously autobiographical writings by a Vietnamese.

About Asian autobiography, one could also look at Pei-Yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), which is a study of the autobiographical tradition in China.

For biography in VN there are of course the Nguyen Dynasty biographies - Dai Nam Liet Truyen, as well as the many records of examination candidates. There are also numerous 18th through 20th century biographies of local heroes, spirits, etc. The tradition of glorifying national heroes, whether they fought the Chinese, the French, the Americans, etc. is also a rich one that belongs to the biographical tradition. I realize that this is a bit off the topic of auto-biography, but it seems that some rewarding research about Vietnamese biographical traditions, their forms, subjects, and objectives could be undertaken.

George Dutton

I’d like to refer to Tran Thai Tong’s introduction to Thien Tong Chi Nam, often cited as “Thie^`n To^ng Chi? Nam Tu+.”, as perhaps one of the first pieces of self-consciously autobiographical writings in Vietnam. Though written in the traditional classical style, it recounted the king’s spiritual crisis which forced him to flee the capital in disguise with the intention of abandoning the throne for a more tranquil existence in Yen Tu mountain. It throws a great deal of light on the thinking of one of the most notable kings of Vietnam in the 13th century, his relationship to National Teacher Phu Van, and the idea of kingship at the time.

One may also mention the 254 NOM poems writen by Nguyen Trai (1380-1442), with a lot of

autobiographical details about his life in exile from the court. Some obvious ones are poem #01, 04, 08, 51, 68, 120, etc. For a classical writer of the 15th century, these poems are unsual in their personal details and reflection.

-Chung